In the beginning of the book, a guy named Ish is bitten by a rattlesnake up in the mountains. He gets to his cabin, uses his snake-bite kit, and lies down. A little later on, two guys walk into his cabin. He calls out to them, saying that he is sick, asking for help, and... they run away!

The next morning, he goes down to a town... and there is nobody there! The town is completely silent; the only living thing is a dog running in the middle of the street. So, Ish breaks in through a store window, and grabs a newspaper, thinking, "What am I anyway? Rip van Winkle?" Even so, Rip van Winkle, though he had slept for twenty years, had come back to a village that was still full of people. But, as he reads the newspaper, he learns that something much worse had happened. While he was up in his cabin in the mountains, a mysterious illness had swept the world. No cure could be found. Almost every human on the face of the earth was now dead! Well, now we know why the men ran away from him when he said he was sick!

So, he sets off, heading for California, looking for other survivors like himself. On his way, he runs into few people, but even fewer decide to go with him....

In the end, he, along with a small group people, end up living in California and having kids, with hopes that someday the human race will rise up again. The kids know nothing of the time before the disease struck the earth....

And, you will know nothing of the rest of this book unless you read it yourself!

-mimiru